Eshnes Pehe - The Blood Drinker

A polished flake of porous stone, stained a deep, rusted brown, this once-hallowed knife contains traces of the eldest of magics.

Before Man, before the Dwarves, before the Elves, shortly after the birth of the Six established the law of nature as we know it, the first life was born from the Light of Alabrin. And under the law of nature, that life grew, and spread, and changed, as life is wont to do. Over the turn of many aeons, so were born the First People, perhaps a thousand thousands of years ago.

Now, The First People lived in a world strange do us, a world devoid of the Gods of Men, for the Gods had not yet been invented; only the elemental concepts of the Six existed. But, as the First People created the first speech, and began to ask questions of their world, to seek to understand the causes and effects of the world, this would change. Having need of them, the First People called to the Gods, and the Gods came. And the first of the Gods who came was Hshen Hreg, the Lord of Feast and Famine.

The First People gave him domain over food, over the hunt and the harvest, and to please him, to bless their hunters and their gatherers, they gave him sacrifice of foodstuffs. They took up a small piece of stone which fell from the sky, and flaked its surface carefully, until it became a knife. And they dedicated that knife to the Lord of Feast and Famine, and when the sky stone soaked away the blood of the kill in the hunt, they named it Eshnes Pehe, the Blood Drinker, and said it was blessed of Hshen Hreg. And when they gave of their meat and fruit to him, by preparing it with the Blood Drinker, and by eating the food, there was much more, and they grew strong and fat, and Hshen Hreg grew strong on their worship.

But, as all things must, this time came to an end. The First People died away, replaced by elves and dwarves and those who would one day become Man. And Hshen Hreg was forgotten, a God become a spirit, then nothing at all. His sacrificial knife, the Blood Drinker was lost, and forgotten. But this knife, being a fusion of the divine and the mundane did not become nothing at all. Rather, it waited for another to take it up from its resting place, among the scattered bones of the First People. Now, half a million years after it was last used, the sun has fallen upon Eshnes Pehe once more, discovered among the bones by a student of ancient history...

Eshnes Pehe is, after a fashion, the corpse of a God. The Corpse of the First God of Mortals. His aspect has been scattered among many of the other gods of mortals, but never has it been forgotten. As such, though the blessings of plenty that once descended through the knife are now gone, it has a certain power in both the mundane world, and that strange place where the Gods do dwell, which is both here and the place of concepts. It is, perhaps, the only weapon made of mortal hands which can slay a God, and now that it moves about the earth once more, this terrifies them. Many are the machinations of the Gods of Mortals to lay hands upon it, either to slay their foes or to deny it to them, and many are their champions who seek it out, for he who holds it will have a power never before seen among the Pantheons - The power to fight, and truly win.

Yet, for a mortal, or even an immortal, to take up the Blood Drinker is not without peril, for it remembers what it always was; a knife of sacrifice. And now, it hungers. It desires, it demands sacrifice, to make up for the time that it laid untouched and unserved. Yet, how may five hundred millennium of hunger be quenched? Only though the most massive of sacrifices. To satiate its hunger, to revive the god will require the death of nearly every living thing, yet the bearer will find himself so compelled, to bring on a world of plenty...

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I like this a lot. The primeval mythology flows simply and elegantly without complications or unnecessary drivel. The Godknife...sacrifice the living en masse for the god's return, or, go thee forth and slay yourself a god.

Oh yeah, this is a nice, fearsome object. I would have it in the hands of a villain, for sure; at first/low levels the pc's will just hear rumours of the villain slaughtering people in the lands, and as the campaign draws on and their levels are raised, the foe will become more prominent in their adventures, and they will learn of the rough-shaped dagger the foe possesses.

It's going to drain out most of what's in the arteries and veins, as if it were hung to bleed from the neck. It's not a vampire, it's a god of harvest and hunting - what's important to it is the act of sacrifice and worship performed with the knife, not the amount of fluid it takes.

Actually, as another hook, it might get... insulted if you don't eat the product of the sacrifice.

Someone like Hannibal Lecter (sp?) would be the perfect owner of this item, found during his years as a grad student screening artefacts. No one ever found his fellow student who disappeared on the dig...